ADGI Design Week 2024: GRAFIS’24

It all started with a single post on November 8, 2024, when ADGI Design Week put out an open call inviting graphic designers, members and non members alike, to submit their studio profile and portfolio for a shot at GRAFIS’24. The moment we saw it, it felt like our shot too. At that point we barely had anything to show. Just Karsa Mono, our debut retail typeface, and one commission we had just wrapped for Satu Collective, SatuCollective Grotesk. But Wacana was built around type design specifically, and this was a call meant exactly for that kind of specific, narrow focus. Passing it up felt like a waste.

Submissions closed on November 16, with 110 studios from across Indonesia sending in their work. We spent the wait in a nothing to lose kind of mood, mostly because there was genuinely nothing to lose yet. Then on December 6, the results were out. GRAFIS’24 had selected 66 studios for its lineup, and somehow, we were one of them.

View the full studio lineup on Instagram, swipe to image 8 to find Wacana TypeFoundry on the list.

That excitement lasted about a day before it turned into pressure. Load in was already set for December 10, which left us barely four days to turn a selection announcement into an actual desk exhibition, on top of a second surprise: SatuCollective Grotesk had also been selected as one of the posters for the entrance corridor, so we needed a full family poster of the typeface ready alongside everything else.

For the desk itself, the concept came almost naturally once we started talking it through: show people how a typeface actually gets made, instead of just showing the finished thing. Type design usually only reaches people as a font file already installed and ready to use, so we wanted to pull that whole process back into view. For Karsa Mono, that meant laying out the earliest pencil sketches of each letterform, the glyph studies where shapes were still being tested and argued over, all the way through to the refined digital drawings that became the final retail release. For SatuCollective Grotesk, we showed the same kind of breakdown, but from a commission’s point of view, tracing how a humanist grotesk skeleton was shaped specifically around Satu Collective’s own identity. Showing both side by side was deliberate. We wanted people to see that Wacana works in two directions at once, a retail typeface anyone can license, and custom typefaces built in close collaboration with Indonesian studios and brands, which is really where most of our focus as a studio sits.

Sketchbook pages and glyph breakdown boards for Karsa Mono and SatuCollective Grotesk, laid out at the desk. Swipe to see more.

The piece that pulled all of that together, and the one we scrambled hardest to finish in time, was a single glyph. The lowercase “a” from Karsa, carved as a standalone object out of real jati wood, reclaimed from offcuts at a workshop near our studio in Jepara.

People can see the whole process of making a typeface laid out on paper. But the moment they see one letter standing as a solid block of jati wood, they just know, this is Jepara.

Loading in on December 10 already felt heavy, the good kind of heavy. Coming all the way from Jepara with everything we had built in those four days, knowing we were about to be in the same room as studios we had only ever known from their Instagram feeds, that pressure hit before the exhibition even opened.

Then came December 11, opening night, and honestly we lost track of time completely. We must have stood at the booth from around 8 in the evening until 11 at night, just talking. People kept coming by, asking about the studio, wanting to hear the Jepara story, curious how a small city studio ended up doing custom typeface commissions. Looking back, that opening night might have been the most prestigious moment of the whole week, except we were too busy talking to fully register it at the time.

For the rest of ADGI Design Week 2024, we showed up almost every single day, sat in on talkshows, and kept running into studios from other cities, just chatting, swapping stories. It genuinely felt like graphic design’s own version of lebaran, every practitioner in Indonesia’s design scene gathered in one space, and for five days we got to be part of that.

Looking back now, the whole thing still feels like a dream. We walked in with nothing to lose, four days and one wooden glyph later we walked out on a first name basis with studios whose work we had studied from a distance for years. No longer far away. Same room, same exhibition, same conversation.

Written by the Wacana TypeFoundry team. All photos by P Genta (@pgenta).